Improvements on the Extended Navigation Module

This week we want to share with you some other improvements coming from the latest Openbravo release. This time these improvements will be mostly technical, aiming on improving performance (specially for high-volumes of data) and user experience.

Today we will talk about the Extended Navigation Model. In Openbravo, in most cases, the entities are defined in a unique window. But there are other entities that, depending on the flow type, are managed by one window or another.

This is the case of the entity “Order”: An order can be a sales order, a purchase order, a return to vendor or a return from customer. To be able to navigate to the correct tab, it has been necessary to implement some rules for the navigation model. That is the aim of the “Extended Navigation Model” project.

Let’s see it with a usability example:

Go to the “lines” tab of the “Sales Invoice” window. There, open any record and click on the “more information” link. There is a navigation link called: “Sales Order Line”. Now, thanks to the new navigation rules, it is possible to set which tab will be opened by clicking that link. Before, the Sales Order was always opened, but now, it is possible to define which one.

1- Forced links: The rules to define the windows are defined in the Preference window.

2- Rules defined at field level: These rules are checked when there are no rules in the Forced links, many rules can be defined and those rules are checked in order of the sequence number of the fields. To create a configuration at field level, go to windows tabs and fields. Suppose that we want to create a navigation rule for a field of Sales Order.
Go to the “Sales Order” window, in the “Tab” tab choose C_OrderLine. There, click on “Field” tab. There, you can choose the field for which you want to create a navigation rule. Click on the product field, for example. Now you can click on the “Navigation rules” tab. There, you will be able to choose to which tab to navigate.

3- Rules defined at table level: These rules are applied after checking the ones at the field level. To create a configuration at table level, go to “Tables and columns” window. Suppose that we want to create a navigation rule for “C_OrderLines” table. Select the “OrderLine” table and click on the “Navigation Rules” tab. There, it is possible to define the Navigation rules for that table.

4- Standard Navigation model rules: The window which has to be opened is defined in the table. These rules are the ones that were defined before the project.

The Standard Navigation rules are overwritten by the rules defined at table level. Moreover, the rules defined at table level can be overwritten by the ones defined at field level.